English Audio Request

The psychiatrists who appear in commercial films can roughly be divided into 3 stereotyped categories: 1. The funny and foolish character who lacks all common sense. He often is more deranged than his patients, but in a harmless way. 2. The intelligent, attractive, modest, warm, etc. psychiatrist who devotes his time and life to the well-being of his patients. He is too perfect to be true and is usually a rather boring character. 3. The thoroughly evil psychiatrist, who abuses his power for his personal ambition or enrichment. He endangers the health and life of his patients with his outrageous treatments and experiments. He is a classical horror movie character. Some of the implications that these prejudiced representations in popular culture have on the doctor-patient relationship will be discussed.
A total of 106 movies were reviewed regarding how psychiatrists/therapists were portrayed. The psychiatrist's or therapist's sex, age, clinical competence and knowledge, boundary violations, attitude toward the patient, influence in the movie's events, treatment modality or modalities used, intervention's outcome, and therapeutic setting.
Results: The therapists tended to be males (71.2%), and (regardless of sex) middle-aged (50.8%). Despite the general view of the psychiatrists/therapists as friendly (63.6%), there was an over-representation of boundary violations. The percentage of total boundary violations was 44.9% of the cases portrayed and sexual violations accounted for 23.7%, while non-sexual violations accounted for 30.5. The appearance of clinical incompetence was 47.5%.
Conclusion: The image of therapists in commercially available movies is not flattering: close to one out of two violated boundaries, close to one out of four committed a sexual boundary violation, and the psychiatrist/therapist was as likely to be incompetent as competent. The bright point is that psychiatrists/therapists were depicted as more likely to be friendly.